January 2010

In December 2006, I wrote a post called Learning how to save which put down in words what I had done to organize my finances the year prior (opened an IRA and rolled my previous retirement accounts into it). Since…

My mom was giddy this morning. “Can I check something on your laptop?” she asked. “Umm sure…” A few seconds later she passed it back to me and told me to read this: Gnomes … traveling through time. I scrolled…

It’s so easy these days to get stuff without even thinking about it. That’s Amazon’s whole value proposition. How to go from thinking about something to buying it in mere seconds. But getting rid of stuff is another matter altogether.…

It’s one thing to put together a photo book. This shot was inspired by How to Photograph a Design Poster It’s a whole ‘nother thing to rewrite the program that builds the book to increase the margins and add a…

One of the first cookbooks that really taught me there was more to cooking than combining a few off-the-self ingredients was Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Seasoned America. Published in 1991, he reinterpreted a broad range of American melting-pot cuisines and “kicked…

This may be old news, but I learned a lot watching this interview with Chipotle’s founder, Steve Ells, and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin. Nightline interview of Chipotle founder, Steve Ells (Source: Chipotle Seeks New Model for Quality Fast Food) Pretty…

In France, Fiat 500s are called “yogurt cups” because they resemble the shape of an upside down yogurt cup. Or at least that’s what Stephanie tells me. Here’s a beautiful old Fiat 500 we saw parked in front of Ristorante…

That would be the name of the cheese class I attended at the Cheese School of San Francisco last Saturday. It was taught by Michelle Buster, who led us through Cheeses of the Mediterranean a year earlier. This time we…

Not all cheeses in France are made with raw milk, but many are, including those aged less than the 60 days required to sell raw milk cheese in the US. Brie and Camembert, for example, are generally aged only 3-4…

Unlike Fahrenheit 451, the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole was not commercially available and, in most cases, the authors are unknown. The works are locked up — with no benefit to anyone — and no one has the key that would unlock them. We have cut ourselves off from our own culture, left it to molder — and in the case of nitrate film, literally disintegrate — with no benefit to anyone. The works may not be physically destroyed — although many of them are; disappearing, disintegrating, or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them. But for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries, they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it; and all this right at the moment when we could have used the Internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access. Bradbury’s firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate.